One of first games I ever played at my dad's work when I was probably 6 or 7 years old. I've always enjoyed flight Sims, understanding this dubiously qualifies :). I've enjoyed the strategic aspect of fuel and bomb management and while the ai is simple, it provided a challenge.

I now have kids of my own; over the winter I setup an old laptop with old games, and started introducing them chronologically to games like Sopwith, Paratrooper, Alley Cat etc.

My 6 year olds son comment on this game in his journal:

"I like: everything. I don't like: nothing."

Took me a second to not over interpret the seeming double negative :-)

Update : years later I played wings of fury on my cousin's amiga 500 ; far better game but not the same magic :)

I loved Sopwith as a child and back in 2004 I made my own version 'Camel' as a homage to Sopwith https://sopwithcamel.sourceforge.net/ to get myself a job in the games industry. Hard to compete with the original though. :)

The first time I ever saw a PC it was running Sopwith. Must have been 1989. I loved the game, but it was this exotic new machine that really interested me. It had 5.25” floppies, probably a 286 and quite an old machine by then.

I had only used Z80/128k machines up to then. My dad had an Amstrad 6128, with those 3” “hard” floppies, sturdy, with a decent thick metal gate.

This PC was a very different beast. I remember being confused about the disks. They seemed weak and unprotected ! you could literally see that delicate magnetic surface through the opening. I had always been told never to touch it, but there it was, just asking to be touched…

The classic Sopwith clone from the golden days of the Finnish shareware game scene, Triplane Turmoil, turns thirty this year. It was open sourced in 2009 and community-ported to more modern platforms via SDL. Was a lot of fun back in the days of shared-keyboard multiplayer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplane_Turmoil

I got sopwith.exe from my uncle's "big blue disks" subscription. plus a lot of other racy games an 8 year old shouldn't have played.

I tried playing a copy on a modern computer and the game started and finished on its own in about 1/4 of a second! i'm not that fast anymore!

I got very good at dropping the bomb while upside down and then flipping and getting outta there. i was also obsessed with disney's tale spin and imagined it was the seaduck.

I remember playing this on my families Olivetti M24. It was very difficult. Maybe because the game was speed sensitive and the M24 was an 8086 running 8Mhz. Good times nonetheless.

Great game. I was hoping for a webgl/wasm version but oh well.

Like many others here I played this a lot when young on my dad’s PC. I remember finding it really hard to play at the time!

I played this on the original IBM PC. (Un)fortunately, my dad got the 8MHz upgrade, so the game was really hard, because it was built for a 4MHz clock.

Luckily someone eventually realeased a DOS utility that would fake a 4MHz clock by making everything take two cycles.

Good times. :)

• wingmanjd

  today at 12:15 AM

  Was the utility called slomo? I recall having to do something like `slomo sopwith.exe` to bring the processing loop back down into human ranges of reaction times.

• hencq

  yesterday at 7:49 PM

  I think ours had a turbo button that would double/half the clock speed. Good times indeed :)

  • jedberg

    yesterday at 7:54 PM

    I seem to recall that the turbo button didn't come along until the 80286, but some of the PC clones had them before that.

    My 486 definitely had a turbo button (that was the one I built after using the original PC for so many years).

    • jasomill

      today at 12:07 AM

      AFAIK no first-party IBM PC ever had a turbo button, only clones, and my only personal recollection of pre-286 clones running significantly faster than 4.77 MHz were the Compaq Deskpro and AT&T PC 6300.

      I don't know about the PC 6300 — I only ever used it to run Aldus PageMaker, which, running under Windows on an 8086, could use all the speed it could get — but the Deskpro had a keystroke combination to switch between native and compatible speeds rather than a button.

    • today at 12:06 AM

    • vasac

      yesterday at 8:02 PM

      The Turbo button worked wonders for Tetris. You start it with turbo turned on, so Tetris adjusts to the computer’s speed - but it only does this once, at startup. As soon as the blocks start falling, you turn the turbo off, and now your Tetris runs at half speed. I even managed, a few times, to roll over a score of 32,768 (ah, those signed integers).

    • hencq

      yesterday at 10:07 PM

      Hmm, maybe my memory is betraying me. I remember our first family computer was an XT and then later we had a 386. Maybe I'm misremembering and it was the 386 that had the turbo button or maybe the earlier one was a clone. My first own PC was a 486 as well that I built together with my dad. Good memories.

One of the PC games that worked great on the sorta-PC 186 RM Nimbus which a lot of British schools had in the 80s and 90s.

Reminds me of Defender, a faster version with a 'Smart Bomb!' that was so fun to use :)

I've spent endless hours playing Sopwith! What a legend!

Discovered this on an old Apple 2 in the 90s. Loved the basic physics of things like flying inverted or flying down low and then releasing a bomb while pulling up into a steep climb so the bomb would fly more laterally to a target.

I was just thinking of this game last night. I was wondering if AI could take the ASM and convert it into a browser game. Playable w/o DOSBOX.

I fondly remember what essentially is a more modern clone of Sopwith - "Pe-2 diving bomber"

It is fun. Shoot-bomb-rearm/refuel in missions, upgrade your plane in between

This is the first computer game I remember playing on my brother's Commodore Colt. I was very bad at it.

More info on the SDL Sopwith port project https://fragglet.github.io/sdl-sopwith/

• nikolay

  yesterday at 9:20 PM

  That's an outstanding port! Kudos!

Did the site get slashdotted?

This game was so fun. I think there's a lot of unexplored game design in this style of 2d aviation.

The multiplayer game Altitude was a good modern example.

• sheiyei

  yesterday at 7:57 PM

  We had an awesome split screen dogfighting game on a Win98 PC where everyone had a Spitfire-like plane and tried to take the others down. You could land at your base and heal etc. Super fun. I think it was called Iron Birds? Don't think I've found it since.

• jauntywundrkind

  yesterday at 7:06 PM

  Lufteauser is a bigger space & higher motion, but has hit some good vibes for me, in this zone. Single player.

  We were always begging the daycare to let us play this. Very solid.

  • teamonkey

    yesterday at 7:57 PM

    Do you mean Luftrausers?

    • jauntywundrkind

      yesterday at 10:04 PM

      Yes sorry thank you!

• lstodd

  yesterday at 7:47 PM

  Highfleet is nice.

What a memory. I loved game.

I remember playing this game on my dad's computer, and being largely baffled at what I was supposed to do. Shoot, drop bombs, of course - but how do I land, refuel, how do the points work?

Still a core memory, though.

Superior successor was Wings of Fury. The DOS version.

Honorable mention: Choplifter. Gameboy.

As a small kid, I learned how to use the DOS command line to launch this game on my parents' PC. I also remember really enjoying Sopwith 2, which added cows, among other things.

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